Mixing

Hello and welcome to my second post on this blog.

Today I want to talk a little bit about mixing and why I love to do it.

I have a passion for things that sound good. Even if I don’t particularly enjoy a piece of music – if it sounds good, I like it. I think I have a pretty good ear for what sounds good and what doesn’t. Ear-training and experience has played a large role in this, but I think I was also born with some natural ability to use my ears in ways that some others just can’t. As a musician and an audio engineer, I am incredibly grateful for this. With every mix, I try my absolute best to serve the song, and to make it sound as good as possible in doing so. While I still have a lot of knowledge and experience to gain, I feel that I can share some useful tips that I have gathered in the time that I have been working with audio.

Before the Mix

In order for a mix to sound good, it needs to be well recorded first. There are so many factors that go into recording but I won’t go too far down that rabbit hole. Essentially, it’s best to use at least decent microphones and set them up correctly in a space with at least decent acoustics. The more you know about recording, the better, especially if decent is all you have to work with. Basically, the better something is recorded, the less work you (or whoever is doing the mixing) will have to do in post. But I want to mainly focus on mixing here. Once the recording has been done, it needs to be mixed well. Mixing, like recording, also has many factors that go into it, and it can get complicated rather quickly.

Check your audio!

One of the biggest and most common mistakes that amateur mixers sometimes make is jumping straight into processing. It can be extremely tempting to start throwing EQ, compression, reverb, etc. on your tracks right off the bat, especially when you have an idea of what you want it to sound like, or if you feel the need to correct something. If this is something you do often, I would encourage you to hold off on that processing for now, but write down your ideas for later. You may still need some of those ideas later, but you may not need others.

First off, it is important to make sure everything is properly in phase and polarity, as this can greatly affect the sound of the mix. Phase and polarity issues only occur when more than one microphone records the same sound source. When these issues go unattended, you can easily get stuck unnecessarily gain-boosting or EQing the hell out of some of your tracks. Phase and polarity correction should be done before anything else.

Volume

The volume mix is quite possibly the most important part of a mix. You can add all the processing you want and make every single track sound pristine, but if your volume mix isn’t good, your overall mix won’t be either. So before adding any processing, get a quick volume mix going to get an idea of how all the tracks fit together into one piece.

It’s amazing how much a good volume mix can do for the sound of the overall mix. It’s always easy to get caught up in processing, but if you can make a mix sound really good by only adjusting the volume faders, you will make it sound incredible by adding any needed processing (so long as you know what you’re doing).

In my next blog I will be doing a “part 2” to this, where I will go over panning, processing, aux bussing, and more.